In recent years, the annual rate of increase among physicians has remained relatively flat while the number of pharmaceutical sales representatives has grown considerably overall, even accounting for recent reductions in field force sizes. As a result, sales call effectiveness has waned in the face of a changing market and physicians' increasingly busy schedules, forcing life sciences organizations to transform their sales and marketing capabilities. Pharmaceutical companies face stiff challenges in terms of completion, cost escalation and reduction in margins, while promoting their products by sending out sales representatives to doctors, hospitals and other medical organizations. Typically the sales representatives, in the few minutes that they get with the audience/doctors, orally explain the complicated details of the medical product and then give handouts, such as presentation material on the product in paper form. A very likely result of such an approach is that after the session the audience would have already forgotten much, depending on the oral presentation skills of the representative, and the handouts will most likely be thrown away. A more effective approach would be to provide the sales representative with an animated presentation that would be more engaging for the little time allotted to the presentation. The sales representative could give the presentation on a mobile client such as a tablet personal computer (“PC”).
However, the mobile thin client may need to perform computationally intense tasks such a decompressing large data files. Such tasks should be carried out asynchronously, allowing the user to continue with other tasks, while the background process performs the required decompression. Typically the server is required to start the asynchronous process, and since a mobile client does not have the server running, the creation of an asynchronous process is not possible. In this case, the decompression must take place synchronously, and the user must wait until the process is complete to use the mobile client again.